EpiphoneSG Special Electric Guitar, Cherry

Great entry-level guitar from Gibson (they own Epiphone). Beautiful tone and pitch. Love the Gibson famous double humbucker pickups found on Les Pauls and SGs. At entry-level, you only get the volume and tone knobs, but a decent amp and fx pedal will fix that. Bought it for my son, but he plays his Ibanez more, so I've been playing it more.

I was very impressed with the quality, finish and playability of this guitar. I've been playing for 30 years and own about a dozen electric guitars of various makes across a wide range of prices. I wanted to get an SG to play some classic rock and have fun with. I didn't expect much for the price, but I tried this guitar and the G400 Pro and honestly preferred the feel of this one.The guitar came boxed with an inner box to protect it during shipping. Although playability out of the box was fairly good, I had to perform a setup to get the guitar exactly as I wanted. I removed the strings, rubbed down and oiled the fingerboard, then strung it with D'Addario 10-46 nickel wounds. The truss rod required a quarter turn adjustment to get the neck profile straight. The intonation and action were pretty much perfect out of the box. I just raised the action a tiny bit to make it more in line with my other instruments.The pickups are a bit darker than a traditional SG and while they sound great heavily overdriven, the clean sound is a bit lacking in character. After a week or so of playing, I replaced the pickups with a set I bought from Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009A5JA98/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1These pickups are amazing value for money and sound fabulous. However the pickup frame was larger than the original stock pickups so I had to rout the body slightly to get the new pickups to fit. This was a simple operation which only took me 10 minutes to do with the Dremel.After a bit of work, this guitar now looks, plays and sounds like a professional instrument. It's rapidly becoming my favorite guitar to jam with. I love it!

I can't believe this Epiphone SG was only $179.00. Details are perfect, neck and frets are perfect, and it sounds great. This is hard to believe. If it stays in tune, it's ready to go on stage. I have no reason to think it won't, the tuners are smooth and tight. Great value, no better than great! As good as guitars selling for hundreds more. I thought this was a beginner guitar for my grand daughter, and in a year or two she'd need something better. I want one for myself too.

Be forewarned: with some work this is a great guitar. The kill switch on the tone pot went bad very quickly because it is garbage, forcing me to change the pot with a good 500 meg pot. Figuring out how to rewire it was a pain in the ass.Also, the guitar has a mahogany veneer over what may be a poplar body. You can't trust the product descriptions on Amazon because the sellers often lie and Amazon lets them get away with deceiving the customer.Had I known a solid mahogany body was available for $80.00 more, I would have bought it.I decided to buy an SG, mostly for sentimental reasons, because the SG was the first guitar I ever played. I was about 12 or 13 years old at a neighbor's house who owned the guitar. I think the only song he knew was "Jumping Jack Flash" by the Rolling Stones.When I held the guitar in my hands I was in a state of awe as I had never held a guitar before. After a few moments of fumbling around, as if by magic I actually began to play some lead guitar that was probably rudimentary, but musically coherent melody. Similar experiences have happened throughout my life, when for brief moments I was able to do the impossible, as though a transmission directly from my unconscious to my conscious mind.My neighbor-friend was in a state of shock because he had never been able to play lead guitar and I who had never even tried to play guitar before was actually playing. After a couple minutes, he demanded I return to guitar to him out of jealousy and fear and never let me play it again.He had turned me on to Black Sabbath which I loved and went out and bought "Paranoid" and "Volume 4". I did not actually begin to learn how to play until several years later, when my uncle gave me a garbage Japanese acoustic guitar that could not be tuned because the bridge was ripping off the face of the guitar.I developed a love and passion for the guitar, especially after hearing Jimi Hendrix several years later, so my guitar obsession naturally shifted to the Stratocaster.Here I am, more than half a century later and my love of the instrument has only grown. I currently have a collection of 27 guitars of all types and makes and this Epiphone SG is the latest addition to the collection. I was not expecting much from a cheap guitar, but figured that it would be a good instrument to modify and transform to a first class instrument, as I have done with many guitars and basses.When I opened the box I was not disappointed and although it felt cheap and light (6.2) Lbs, and likely neither mahogany or alder as advertised the fit, finish and color is over all, excellent which is common for cnc manufactured instruments which virtually eliminate human error.After tuning, I plugged the cable in to my 2 amp system my pedal board divided with 2 independent pedal chains dedicated to each amp, I was pleasantly surprised. It felt great and sounded as good as it looks, I decided that I am not going to change the pickups because they sound great.As I expected, with all cheap guitars, the tuners are absolute garbage which I will change and will make a few other modifications (I bought a roller bridge for under $13.00 delivered from ebay and quality Chinese made locking tuners from Amazon), I am going to make a custom nut out of a brass rod and modify the kill switch on the tone pot to eliminate the excessive noise and replace the plastic fret markers with abalone. Eventually I may change the pots and tone capacitor, but am leaving them for now, because: "if it ain't broke. don't fix it".Its kind of amusing how as much as things change on some fundamental level they remain the same. As my musical tastes matured and expanded far beyond rock and classical music, to Jazz, Flamenco, Indian, Arab, African, Japanese, Chinese and every form and idiom imaginable, I recently returned to listen to Black Sabbath who I had dismissed decades ago as adolescent and irrelevant only to remember why I loved them in the first place and realized exactly how great a guitarist Tony Iomi is and his contribution to rock as one of the originals. While I hate heavy metal, I love Tony's playing.Derek Trucks, the great Slide Player of the Allman Brothers was part of my desire for an SG style guitar and I can tell you that while I would have preferred real mahogany, I am really glad I bought this guitar because cheap or not, it is a great guitar that is fantastic for slide.